I’m still learn­ing how to process RAW images using Dark­table on Lin­ux. I think I’ve found a few good tuto­ri­als, but I need more prac­tice. I’d like to learn how to remove noise with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the sharp­ness, for exam­ple. (Maybe I need to shoot at low­er ISO and then stack and align the pho­tos?)

Any­way, I shot this south of Bran­don on the evening of May 31st (or maybe real­ly ear­ly on the morn­ing of June 1st). Enjoy!

It’s a long week­end Mon­day here in Cana­da, so I went for a nice long bike ride today. 23km and change, in a bit under two hours. There was quite a wind out of the east, so I’m hap­py with that time.

I had my cam­era with me, and so I snapped a cou­ple pho­tos: a goose land­ing in the riv­er, above, and a train under the 1st Street bridge, below.

I did­n’t get a pho­to of the fam­i­ly in the not-yet-open splash park on 1st Street south of Rich­mond (Kins­men Park, I think), mak­ing do with a water-gun fight.

I real­ly want to like the new The Twi­light Zone. But I think the prob­lem with an anthol­o­gy series is that you’re always start­ing from square one. Every episode requires an all-new round of expo­si­tion, and expo­si­tion is hard to do well.

I real­ly don’t like the “as you know, Sal­ly” style of expos­i­to­ry dia­logue, where char­ac­ters say things to each oth­er that they both already know, for the ben­e­fit of the audi­ence. It sticks out like the cliché sore thumb for me.

And there’s a lot of it in this first sea­son of The Twi­light Zone.

Maybe it’ll get bet­ter, but so far I’m on the sixth episode, and it’s not been liv­ing up to my hopes.

(On the plus side, the act­ing has been top-notch, across all the episodes. Even the child actors have most­ly impressed me.)

Update

Well, episode 6 — “Six Degrees of Free­dom” — was def­i­nite­ly a brighter spot, at least for me. It had some issues, sure — tech­ni­cal quib­bles on the lev­el of CBC’s SF attempt Ascen­sion, q.v., but at least they tried hard­er. (For instance, they gave a rea­son, how­ev­er ludi­crous, that the Mars ship would have arti­fi­cial grav­i­ty.) The sto­ry, though, man­age to cap­ture me and hold me till its end, even with a bit of clunky “as you know, Kather­ine” bits of info­dump.

Seems I can for­give a bit of clunky writ­ing if the over­all sto­ry is good enough.